So begins Daniel Marcus’ wonderful short science fiction story “Echo Beach.” In designing a cover for the Echo Beach e-book (Available at Amazon US, UK, CA and AU), I wanted the sun to be an overwhelming presence, dominating the design and leaving room for nothing else but the doomed, outgunned planet Earth, pictured here at the end of its existence.

For a title font I chose the utterly simple and mostly unremarkable Arial Black. At large sizes it has a “too-big-for-its-britches” quality I was looking for for this cover. I made the type exceed the boundaries of the cover, much as the sun has grown too large to be contained. BIG. Not just as big as the sun, but as big as a colossal, swollen monster sun that will soon exceed the boundaries of the solar system.

The image of the earth repeats throughout the book, both in its peaceful blue-marble appearance and its fiery end-of-the-world mode. It appears in various sizes on the title page and at the ends of sections.

Cherrylog Press logo

The logo for Cherrylog Press, Daniel’s publishing company, came about after a search for photos of abandoned cars to evoke the mood of the James Dickey poem “Cherrylog Road.” This stock photo by Andrejs Pidjass (NejroN Photo) fit the bill nicely, and the typeface Honest John’s helped evoke a 1930s feeling in a green sampled from the photo, then saturated to help it stand out from the more muted colors of the old car and the surrounding greenery.

This is the premiere publication for Cherrylog Press, and Daniel has more projects planned for the future. Watch this space. Meanwhile, give yourself a reading treat and buy Echo Beach from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, or any Amazon store worldwide. It will soon be available at other online stores, too.